What's Michael Moore Doing This Election?

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You may have heard how the 2004 election came out. Bush, who lost the popular count by half a million votes in 2000, won by 3 million the next time around. He also took virtually every state Moore campaigned in. So the only suspense in the movie is how Moore will somehow claim victory. He does it at the end by noting that young people, his target audience, voted in record numbers and that they were the only age group to go for Kerry. That's impressive, Pyrrhically, except that Moore's stated purpose in making Fahrenheit 9/11 was to end the Bush regime. Mission not accomplished. Maybe this time.

An American Carol

It must be a weird honor, being the only documentary filmmaker ever to be the central savaging point of a right-wing satire. And by David Zucker, part of the Kentucky Fried Theater team (Jim Abrahams and Zucker's brother Jerry are the other two) who launched the Airplane!, Naked Gun and Hot Shots! franchises and took over and revived the Scary Movie series. Moore probably doesn't feel flattered, since An American Carol depicts its lead character, one Michael Malone, as a bumbling, politically myopic slob who gets swindled into a plot to blow up Madison Square Garden. But in offering Malone a re-education in "patriotism" and letting him survive the movie, it's nicer to Moore than the Trey Parker–Matt Stone marionette movie Team America: World Police was. In that one, Moore was bent on destroying Mount Rushmore and so became a suicide bomber.

That's just the job description that the Afghan terrorist leader Aziz (Robert Davi) needs filled. "It is getting harder and harder to find good suicide bombers," he laments. "All the good ones are gone." The group could use a good recruitment video — but who would direct it? "We need someone who really, really hates America." Cut to Malone (Kevin Farley, brother of the late Chris), who's shooting a health-care documentary — obviously Moore's Sicko — in Cuba. He's thrilled to be in an island paradise. The locals, not so much: they fight to get on the boat taking Malone back to the U.S., where a critics' group gives him the coveted Leni Riefenstahl Award for his films Die You American Pigs and America Sucks the Big One. But the auteur is not as popular with "real" Americans. He is called a "fat, ignorant, America-hating traitor," a "sack o' shit" and, by the ghost of J.F.K., "a douche bag."

The ghost of J.F.K.? Yes, this is an update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with Kennedy as Marley's Ghost. George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) is the Ghost of America Past, George Washington (Jon Voight) the Ghost of America Present, and an Angel of Death (Trace Adkins) points Malone to the future. From these wraiths we learn that pacifists like Malone would have been responsible for the continuation of slavery into the 21st century (because they opposed the Civil War) and for the Holocaust (you know why). A flashback to 1938 shows Neville Chamberlain signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler, then shining the Nazi leader's shoes as he and his henchman sing Kumbaya. Finally seeing the red light, Malone takes the Garden stage to proclaim, "We're in a real war, people, with the worst threat since the Nazis!" And he doesn't mean the Patriot Act.

The movie finds other butts of satire: "Movealong.com," left-wing teachers, ACLU lawyers (they're portrayed as zombies gunned down by Judge Dennis Hopper) and, for raising taxes during a recession and suggesting that Israel practices apartheid, Jimmy Carter; he's seen presiding over a Surrender Ceremony with China. To prove it's fair and balanced, the film — which was not screened in advance for the press but was shown to 2,500 delegates during the Republican National Convention — also has a Larry Craig joke. Malone asks, "You heard the rumors about Lincoln being gay?" Patton replies, "Maybe he just had a wide stance."

Moore, though, is the main victim. The movie's take on him can be synopsized in the title of a book published within a few weeks of the Fahrenheit 9/11 opening: Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. (That was a riff on Al Franken's best seller Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.) Malone is more or less accused of treason: giving aid and comfort to the enemy by making movies that "hate America." One soldier back from Iraq says that he and his buddies found a lot of Malone DVDs when they captured Saddam's palace.

But this is a comedy, similar in slapstick tone and comic asides to the Naked Gun movies. And like the police detective played there by Leslie Nielsen, Malone is a guy whose blithe stupidity brings physical harm to those around him — an idiot cocooned in delusion. It happens that Malone's story is narrated by Leslie Nielsen, playing an amiable but slightly loony oldster. So it's possible to take the whole movie as a parody of right-wingers' views of left-wingers.

The movie isn't as deft or compact as Zucker's YouTube video this summer of a man being strangled by the pump at a gas station, but it has its funny parts. One is the running gag that Malone isn't a "real" moviemaker because he does documentaries. "Nobody likes documentaries," somebody says. "But many people find them restful." As it happens, Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more at the domestic box office than any movie David Zucker has directed. And though Grandpa Nielsen's closing argument is that "It turned out that people actually wanted to see movies that show all the good things about America," An American Carol hasn't exactly broken box-office records. After 30 days in release, it's earned about $7 million. The Bill Maher anti-God documentary Religulous, released the same day, has taken in $11.4 million.

Mike the Documentary Filmmaker isn't godless; he's a practicing Catholic. And his works suggest that Moore doesn't hate anybody; he hates the harm he thinks they've done to the country he loves. It's the American way for the people out of power to criticize the ones in power. It's certainly the way of the American left. Whereas the right usually stays loyal to its public officials through thin and thinner, the left often creates a Platonic ideal that few politicians, schooled in the art of compromise, can satisfy.

If an Obama Administration collapses toward the center, we'll see if Moore turns his disappointment into creative anger and makes a corrosive documentary on the light that failed. If Obama sticks to his liberal guns, and the right fights to strip him of his artillery, then Moore may for once direct a film that doesn't attack the crimes of the right but defends a man he believes in.

(See the screwups of Campaign '08.)

(See pictures of the campaign from Barack Obama's point of view.)

(See pictures of John McCain's final push on the campaign trail.)